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Pope Francis’ election stirs up Argentine ‘dirty war’ allegations

It was known as the Dirty War — a dark and savage time — and its memory haunts Argentina.

Almost no one in that South American country, not even a man now known as Pope Francis, can escape the stigma of the conflict, which ended three decades ago, at least in theory. But not quite in fact.

This handout picture released on March 14 by the Vatican press office shows Pope Francis arriving for a prayer at Rome's Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica early on his first full day as the head of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics. (AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

And so it was probably inevitable that the echoes of those terrible years would resound halfway around the world, in St. Peter’s Square, only hours after 115 cardinals elected a South American cleric as the 266th leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio — or Pope Francis — is an Argentine, after all.

He was also a prominent church leader during the depths of his country’s internal war, which pit the ruling armed forces against the so-called “militant left,” a term that could and did mean just about anyone.

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To be a victim of the dictatorship in those deadly times, it was often enough simply to be poor.

As for those in the higher echelons of Argentina’s Catholic Church, they either looked the other way or, worse, actively collaborated with their country’s military rulers.

“The hierarchy of the church was considered complicit with the dictatorship,” said a human-rights activist in Buenos Aires, who asked to remain anonymous because he isn’t authorized to speak on behalf of his organization.

Upwards of 30,000 people are thought to have perished during the Dirty War, which formally lasted from 1976 until 1983.

Few who lived during those times managed to get through them completely unscathed, and many now believe that the first-ever pope from South America is himself tainted by the conflict.

“There were bishops who were complicit with the dictatorship, but not Bergoglio,” Perez told the BBC Spanish-language service. “He had no ties to the dictatorship.”

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He did, however, hold a powerful position as leader in Argentina of the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits.

His critics say he could have used his office to confront the military junta openly but, like other senior clerics, Bergoglio did no such thing.

“The only ones who defended the disappeared were from the ‘Third World’ church,” said Gonzalo Seoane, a spokesman for the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, an organization representing parents who lost their offspring during the years of terror. “(Pope Francis) was not of the ‘Third World’ church.”

The “Third World” church was a network of priests and nuns who defied the Catholic hierarchy and devoted themselves to the spiritual and material needs of the poor.

“The Argentine church was distinctly conservative,” said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a Washington think-tank. “It was a church of the rich and not of the poor.”

According to his critics, Bergoglio fell short of his moral duty on two or more specific occasions.

One case involved two Jesuit priests — Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics — who worked in an impoverished neighbourhood and who were therefore risking their lives.

Both were kidnapped in May 1976, apparently by Argentine navy troops.

Some of his critics say Bergoglio bears some of the blame for their detention — having failed, they say, to give them adequate protection. They also believe he did not seek their freedom as aggressively as he could have.

Bergoglio contests those charges. In 2010, while archbishop of Buenos Aires, he testified in court that he buttonholed all sorts of people in efforts to rescue the two priests. He says he held two meetings with navy commander Emilio Massera, who provided no help at all.

Later, Bergoglio said, he met twice with army chief Jorge Rafael Videla to plea for the priests’ release — once again, to no avail.

In the end, after five months of imprisonment and torture in the Navy Mechanics School, the two priests were abandoned — drugged and seminude — in the countryside. Bergoglio says he helped both men to flee the country, Yorio to Rome and Jalics to the United States.

Another case involved human-rights activist Estela de la Cuadra, who says Bergoglio was informed in 1977 that her sister, Elena, had been kidnapped by the military while five months pregnant and that the newborn child was later put up for adoption.

Estela, whose sister has never been found, says she was merely referred to another priest, who spoke to a police officer named Reinaldo Tabernero. The police officer confirmed what had happened but refused to provide further information because “everything has worked out fine.”

Despite all this, says de la Cuadra, Bergoglio would later insist he’d had no knowledge of the robbery of babies by the military until long after the conflict was over.

Finally, a Paraguayan woman named Esther Ballestrino de Carreaga was kidnapped by navy troops in 1977. Her body was later discovered on a beach near Buenos Aires. Years earlier, she had been a good friend and colleague of Bergoglio in a laboratory where he had worked as a chemist before joining the priesthood.

“It hurt me very much,” he later said, referring to her death. “I tried to put myself in contact with some relative of hers, but I was unable to.

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